Old . . .

. . . saw

. . . but food for thought . . .


(from http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2008/01/the_case_against_ hillary_clinton.html by the late Christopher Hitchens)
". . . Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy "experience"—Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim "worked" well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton's memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York.

Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually yielded to fact-checking. Indeed, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: "It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add."

Perfect. It worked, in other words, having been coined long after Sir Edmund became a bankable celebrity, but now its usefulness is exhausted and its untruth can safely be blamed on Mummy. Yet isn't it all—all of it, every single episode and detail of the Clinton saga—exactly like that? . . . "

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The Best Policy?. . .

(from No One Left To Lie To; The Values of the Worst Family by Christopher Hitchens)

"The impression has been allowed to solidify that there was no price to be paid for all this; that the very definition of political skill was an ability to act without conscience.  Appalled by the sheer raw ruthlessness of the President and his defenders, the Republicans and the conservative churches decided to call it a day.  Marvin Olasky, the born-again Rightist who had originated the idea of "welfare reform" and been at Newt Gingrich's elbow, wrote a book on Presidential morality in which he said that if only Clinton had been a more regular churchgoer, and would even now ask for God's mercy, all might be well.  It was no only liberals who failed the test set by Clintonism: the world of the "prayer breakfast" was his ally as surely as were the boardrooms and the Dow Jones.  But millions of Americans still realized that something had been lost in the eight years of reptilian rule.  The embarrassing emptiness of the 2000 election, especially the loss by the Democratic Party of even the slightest claim to any moral or ethical advantage, is one small symptom of what has been so casually thrown away.  Meanwhile, the warm-blooded and the thin-blooded could only discuss the scaly and the remorseless in hushed tones, as the ensuing chapter will demonstrate.  Perhaps one day the hot-blooded will have their revenge. . . "

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Things . . .

. . . we've ALL forgotten. . .

. . . conveniently. . .


The Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories have never been convincingly refuted.

Ted Kennedy's episode with Mary Jo Kopechne was never satisfactorily explained.

People actually praised Richard Nixon upon his death in spite of his suspicions, grudges, lies, deceit, vulgarity, mean-spiritedness and paranoia.

Mother Theresa is internationally revered even though her positions were ultra-reactionary and fundamentalist even in orthodox Catholic terms.

Ronald Reagan is viewed as a hero even though he single-handedly sought to destroy the credibility of the United Nations, spat in the face of international law, and brought misery and suffering to the oppressed working class across the world.

George H. W. Bush is deemed an innocent incompetent notwithstanding his incomplete triumph in the first Gulf War or the broken promise ("read my lips: no new taxes") which came to embody his Republican Party's unwavering commitment to perpetual tax cuts and staggering debt.  Instead, Poppy's legacy can be summed up in three words he introduced to enable Republicans and their conservative amen corner to brush off charges of their own corruption and law-breaking: "criminalization of politics."  From Iran-Contra, Plamegate and Tom Delay to the U.S. attorneys purge and his son's regime of detainee torture, 41's criminalizing politics defense  has been part of the GOP scandal playbook ever since.

The events of 9-11-2001 have never been fully investigated to the point that the 9-11 Commission's conclusions appear to be a coverup.

Barack Obama ran for president of the U.S. on the premise of change but has, in reality, changed very little of what the prior administration hath wrought.

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Holy. . .

. . . cow. . . 

(from wikipedia.com)
". . . Hugh Marjoe Ross Gortner (generally known as Marjoe Gortner; born 14 January 1944 in Long Beach, California) is a former revivalist and actor who first gained attention during the late 1940s when, aged four, he became the youngest-known ordained preacher. He then gained notoriety in the 1970s when he starred in Marjoe, an Oscar-winning behind-the-scenes documentary about the lucrative business of Pentecostal preaching. The name "Marjoe" is a portmanteau of the biblical names "Mary" and "Joseph".

When Gortner was five, his father, Vernon, a third-generation[clarification needed] minister, noticed his son's talent for mimicry and his fearlessness of strangers and public settings. His parents claimed he had received a vision from God during a bath, but this was later conceded by Marjoe to be a lie his parents forced him to repeat. He claimed they enforced this by mock-drowning him because they could not beat him which would leave bruises which might be noticed during his many public appearances. They began training him to deliver sermons, complete with dramatic gestures and emphatic lunges. By the time he was four, his parents arranged for him to perform a marriage ceremony for a film crew from Paramount studios and referred to him as "the youngest ordained minister in history". It is not clear, however, who ordained him or if he was even ordained at all.

Until his teenage years, Gortner and his parents traveled the United States holding revival meetings. As well as teaching him scriptural passages, his parents also taught him several money-making tactics involving the sale of supposedly "holy" articles at revivals which promised to heal the sick and dying. By the time he was sixteen, his family had amassed what he later estimated to be three million dollars. Shortly after Gortner's sixteenth birthday, his father absconded with the money and a disillusioned Marjoe left his mother for San Francisco.[citation needed] He spent the remainder of his teenage years as an itinerant hippie until his early twenties, when, hard-pressed for money, he decided to put his old skills to work and re-emerged on the preaching circuit with a charismatic stage-show modeled after those of contemporary rockers, most notably Mick Jagger. He made enough to take six months off every year, during which he returned to California and lived off the previous six months' earnings.

In the late 1960s, Gortner suffered a crisis of conscience about his double life and felt his performing talents might be put to better use as an actor or singer. . . "

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Where's the Cheer?. . .

. . .That I should feel
Inside my heart
This time of year
While all the
Televisions
Newspapers
And billboards
Count the shopping days
For me

It appears
To me that
I'm the only one
Who doesn't see
The fine and natural
Attraction to what seems
Part race
Part obstacle course
I believe

Long ago I leaned that we
Celebrate this season
Anniversary of the birth
Of someone named Jesus

Through the years
How my perception of it all
Has gone awry
When so much
Manufactured hype
And pressurized requirements
Make it all seem a lie

How I wish
Since it's the
Time of year that
Dreams can come alive
That you and I
See one November when
Without the retail forecasting
Some peace on earth
Goodwill to all arrives

CHEER
©2007 Raymond M. Jozwiak


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Top Stories

A Clown

From Andrew Sullivan, The Dish. . .

". . .Even Chris Wallace cannot help laughing at this preposterous grifter. But creepier still is the fact that her cult followers responded to this perfectly predictable gaffe by trying to edit the Wikipedia entry on Revere to align it with Palin's ramblings about his "warning the British" that ... oh, let's not even bother.

Check out this surreal Wiki page in which the cultists are trying to insist that Revere did indeed warn the British, and use Palin's own quote as a source! I love this succinct response from a Wiki editor:

In the article on Paul Revere, someone has added false information in an effort to support Sarah Palin's FALSE claims about Paul Revere. "Accounts differ regarding the method of alerting the colonists; the generally accepted position is that the warnings were verbal in nature, although one disputed account suggested that Revere rang bells during his ride.[8][9]" This must be removed as it is a LIE designed to mislead. dj

One of the most pernicious and dangerous features of Palin is her clinical refusal to understand reality, to accept error, to acknowledge when the facts she has cited are not actually facts, but delusions. And her vanity and pathologies are so deep she will insist that black is white until her minions actually find a source to prove it. . . "

I hope her infatuated fans can eventually identify the lack of gravity possessed by this clown and rightly conclude that her talents lie more is self-promotion and entertainment than in government.







Visit Doug Alan Wilcox's Website
Doug Alan Wilcox with Ray Jozwiak, Frederick Coffee Company, June 11 @ 8PM

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